The Scoop.it Content Curation Blog

How content curation can help you to engage your audiences

Visual Content

If you’re limiting your content curation to sharing third-party content on social media, you’re missing out. Content curation is also a great way to enrich your blog or website: don’t just list great resources on your home page, turn them into curated posts..

I have some bad news for you. Your “readers” aren’t reading much. According to the globally-revered usability expert Jakob Nielsen, “On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the…

When content marketing comes to mind, most people think about blog posts, news articles, press releases, and eBooks. And while these are all key components of an effective content marketing strategy, you can’t generate the…

A lot of marketers and advertisers criticize the marketing funnel for being too simplistic – too linear to be an accurate reflection of a real buyer’s journey. And to some extent, this criticism is fair….

While there’s nothing wrong with standard text-based content, it’s important that businesses develop alternative methods for “spicing things up.” When used in conjunction with quality articles, blog posts, and website copy, interactive features can really…

Bygone days. It used to be simpler. Marketers would create super-well designed brochures and pay to advertise their product/service in front of their audience. Wait. What just happened? Internet of course. Internet changed everything. 90% of…

SlideShare is a great platform for visual content and an amazing company: in just a few years, it has become the YouTube of presentations, one of the Top 150 sites in the world with an impressive 3 Billion views per month from 60 million unique visitors. Perhaps like many others, I originally thought of SlideShare as a platform to use only on specific occasions: when I had talked at a conference, when we had produced great slides worth sharing or when we had something specifically visual to communicate. I had had great experience and results but I don’t talk to conferences every day and so I sometimes felt I was missing out. And then, one night of September last year, I heard Jason Miller present at one of our #leancontent events and it became all clear: the team and I realized we could use SlideShare in a very different way – not just as a tool to recycle and share what you already created for other purposes but as a media channel that we would update on a regular basis. In a word, as a visual blog.

We decided to try it: over the next few months, we tried to publish at least every other week to SlideShare, integrating it in our content calendar alongside our blog and our Scoop.it content curations.

Several studies have shown that small and mid-size businesses massively use social media as a digital marketing tactic. But at Scoop.it we wanted to take it a step further: how do small and mid-sized businesses use social media? What are their key opportunities? Over the past few months, we surveyed more than 3,000 SMBs: some within the Scoop.it user base, some outside of it. We asked questions, collected behavioral data and discovered intriguing findings which we plan to release in several parts – the first of which being in this SlideShare presentation.

The first lesson we learned is that LinkedIn Company Pages seem to be a major opportunity not yet leveraged by many SMBs. Though LinkedIn is THE business social network, SMBs still don’t see their future on LinkedIn and prefer to invest their time and effort in Facebook and Twitter. Interestingly, this is not because they don’t see the value: the large majority (67%) understands that LinkedIn is a great fit for them, but they simply don’t have the time nor the content they need to take advantage of LinkedIn Company Pages as an important marketing opportunity. Additionally, they lack ways to measure the impact their LinkedIn campaigns or content would have on their digital marketing strategies.

So today, we’re happy to announce that we’re introducing a solution to this problem by integrating LinkedIn Company Pages as a sharing option within Scoop.it…

Today the third major social network is becoming a public company. As with all major IPO’s, we will read a lot of diverse and conflicting opinions on its valuation: to some Twitter will be an overpriced money-losing startup, to others it will be the next major player of the Web and undervalued.

To add a data point to the debate, the Scoop.it team decided to study the value of social networks to small and mid-size businesses.

Editor’s Note: We’ve always held that content curation (with added insight and value) is great for SEO. The below infographic (courtesy of TechMagnate and Beth Kanter) lays out some of the benefits of content curation.

What exactly is content curation? To Scoop.it, its the “meaningful selection and sharing of online content for professional purposes or personal passions.” Professional purposes run the gamut from thought leadership to product marketing, and personal passions can be gathering and sharing knowledge about anything that gets your engine going. Many people curate every day without knowing it — whether it is sharing an insightful article they discovered on their favorite blog or retweeting a thought leader of their choosing. Curation is everywhere!

Web platforms may one day catch up to traditional institutions like the Library of Congress in their ability to collect and organize millions of documents, according to an infographic by content curation platform Scoop.it.